Brian Gleeson
Brian Gleeson is an actor, born 1987.
Being Brendan Gleeson's son and Domhnall Gleeson's brother is a fact about Brian Gleeson that he has largely outrun by taking parts nobody hands to a nepotism story: unstable, unlikeable, frequently pathetic men.
He started acting in 2006 and got his first real notice as Hughie in the opening season of Love/Hate, which brought an Irish Film and Television Award nomination. Since then the pattern has been a striking supporting turn inside somebody else's prestige project. He is Jimmy McCavern in Peaky Blinders, a Scottish gang leader with none of the show's glamour attached. He is the Younger Brother in mother!, a small part carrying an enormous amount of unpleasantness. Phantom Thread uses him for a doctor's visit and gets a whole social register out of it. Logan Lucky, Assassin's Creed, Snow White and the Huntsman and Hellboy are the studio jobs.
The best of the recent work is at home. Bad Sisters gave him Thomas Claffin, an insurance investigator whose incompetence is played as tragedy and farce at the same time, and it is the fullest thing he has done. Frank of Ireland, which he co-created and stars in, is aggressively unlikeable comedy that will divide people entirely along the line of whether they enjoy watching men fail. He was born in Dublin in 1987.
Movies (10)
TV (11)
Where to start with Brian Gleeson
Bad Sisters is the one to start with. Thomas Claffin is a man drowning in a case he cannot prove and a life he cannot afford, and Gleeson finds the exact point where farce and desperation stop being separable. It is also the easiest of these to simply sit down and watch.
For the harder material, Peaky Blinders gives him a frightening antagonist with no sympathetic beat anywhere, and mother! uses him as pure intrusion. Phantom Thread is the smallest and most precise thing here. Frank of Ireland is the divisive one: if you want to see what he does when nobody is restraining him, it is that. Logan Lucky and Snow White and the Huntsman are the pleasant studio detours, and The Lazarus Project is the science-fiction hook if you want a plot to chase.
The prestige films
A remarkable two-year run working for Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky and Steven Soderbergh. The parts are small in all three and he is unrecognisable between them, which is rather the point of the job.
The Irish television
The domestic work is where the career started. Love/Hate brought the IFTA nomination and is still the best-regarded Irish drama of its decade, and Frank of Ireland is the comedy he wrote and starred in with his brother Domhnall.
The British series
Jimmy Shelby in Peaky Blinders is the role with the widest audience. Bad Sisters is the better-written show by some distance, and The Lazarus Project is the time-loop thriller that deserved a good deal more attention.